From Crosscut.com and Green Acre Radio
By Martha Baskin
As spring turns a warm corner, there’s no better place to experience it than a wetland, alive with swallows and the chorus of frogs. One wetland, once the former “Naval Air Station Seattle at Sand Point,” is about metamorphosis — of both creatures and place.
Miriam Preus knows the wetlands at Magnuson Park very well. A wetland gardener, she’s the one who maintains the marsh ponds and frog ponds where once there was a naval air station. “My greatest joy here is that it takes more imagination to imagine this site as a jet runway than it does to imagine a wetland being on the site,” she says.
Preus takes a break from thinning cattails — they jeopardize biodiversity, she says.
Nearby barn swallows and blue violet swallows, recent arrivals from South America , outfly raptors on the hunt. Their calls mingle with frogs and other wildlife who find the wetlands a perfect breeding ground in spring and a refuge all year long.
(To read the full article, go to crosscut.com/2012/04/13/In-Magnuson-Park%2C-tadpoles-swim-where-planes-once-landed/
Martha Baskin is an environmental reporter, whose work on the subject began with a project for the King Conservation District. )
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